WASHINGTON — SpaceX launched greater than 100 satellites within the ninth in a series of dedicated smallsat rideshare missions Nov. 11, the newest flight in a program that has generated each delight and disdain across the industrial space industry.
A Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 1:49 p.m. Eastern on the Transporter-9 mission. The booster, which previously launched 11 missions including Transporter-8 in June, landed back on the launch site seven and a half minutes after liftoff.
Transporter-9 carried 90 payloads deployed over the course of half an hour, starting about 55 minutes after liftoff, although confirmations of a successful deployment were initially missing for several of the satellites. Those payloads included several orbital transfer vehicles that may later deploy their satellites, bringing the entire satellites on the launch to greater than 110.
The shopper with essentially the most payloads on Transporter-9 was Planet. The corporate had 36 of its Dove imaging cubesats, collectively called Flock 4Q, on the launch. It also flew Pelican-1, a tech demo satellite for its future Pelican and Tanager high-resolution and hyperspectral imaging satellites.
Other satellite constellation operators that flew satellites on Transporter-9 include Spire, which operates a constellation to gather weather and vessel tracking data, in addition to synthetic aperture radar imaging corporations Iceye and Umbra. Spire’s set of satellites included three satellites for GHGSat to watch greenhouse gas satellites, considered one of which is the primary industrial satellite for tracking carbon dioxide emissions.
Among the many newcomers on the launch was Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer best known for producing consumer electronics devices like Apple’s iPhone. The corporate, also referred to as Hon Hai Technology Group, included its first two cubesats, Pearl-1H and Pearl-1C, on the mission. Those spacecraft are “a pilot run as proof of the concept for our efforts in LEO satellite broadband communications and next-gen, beyond 5G capabilities,” said Jen-Ming Wu of the Hon Hai Research Institute in a Nov. 6 statement.
The 2 Foxconn satellites are amongst nearly three dozen manifested on the launch by Exolaunch, considered one of several rideshare brokers flying payloads on the mission. Others include Maverick Space Systems, SEOPS and Momentus, which included five satellites on the mission but without considered one of its Vigoride tugs.
D-Orbit, one other major user of Transporter missions, flew one other of its ION tugs on Transporter-9. Two latest orbital transfer vehicle developers, Exotrail and Impulse Space, flew their first tugs, spacevan-001 and Impulse-1, on the mission.
The Transporter missions have elicited strong reactions across the industrial space industry. Satellite operators and rideshare launch brokers have hailed them for providing regular and low-cost space access, particularly when there are limited options from other launch providers.
“I can’t understate what a critical a part of the NewSpace industry Transporter missions are,” remarked Todd Master, chief operating officer of Umbra, on social media. “There are entire businesses which might be enabled by this that might not have existed 5 years ago.”
Developers of small launch vehicles, though, have argued Transporter missions undercut their business models by offering launch services at much lower per-kilogram costs than their vehicles. Some have gone thus far as to accuse SpaceX of predatory pricing, claiming the corporate is offering Transporter launch services below its costs.
“They’re, little by little, taking on what the small launch vehicles are in a position to accomplish,” said Curt Blake, former chief executive of launch services company Spaceflight who now leads the industrial space group at law firm Wilson Sonsini, in the course of the Satellite Innovation conference last month in Mountain View, California. Small launch vehicles can still fill some niches, he argued, “but you’ve to think about it as a threat.”
SpaceX continues to see strong demand for its Transporter services. The corporate’s online booking system shows the earliest opportunity for a launch to sun-synchronous orbit on its Transporter missions to be in October 2025. The corporate announced in August a brand new line of rideshare missions to mid-inclination orbits, called Bandwagon, starting in 2024. The earliest available opportunity for the Bandwagon missions is November 2024.